Alibaba Founder Pressures Employees To Promote App

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s employees are now under pressure to go out and promote the company’s little-known smartphone messaging application, after Jack Ma, the company founder, sent an internal memo urging employees to help find more users.

“Everyone can help build up Laiwang. Don’t tell me you can’t,” said Mr. Ma in the memo. Mr. Ma also said at the end of the message that employees have to find 100 new Laiwang users outside the company by the end of November. If they fail to do so, they should not expect ’”red packets,” Mr. Ma said, referring to reward money handed to employees as gesture of appreciation.

Mr. Ma is known for his provocative remarks inside and outside the company. But it is an indication of how desperately Alibaba wants to raise Laiwang’s profile at a time when Tencent Holding Ltd.’s WeChat messaging app (Weixin in Chinese) is cementing its position as the most popular smartphone communication app.

Alibaba, founded by Mr. Ma in 1999, dominates China’s e-commerce market with its Taobao and Tmall online marketplaces. The privately-held company is now preparing to go public in what could be the technology industry’s largest initial public offering since Facebook Inc.’s market debut last year. Alibaba is considering an IPO in the U.S. after its talks with Hong Kong’s exchange and regulators recently broke down, according to people familiar with the matter.

One of the biggest challenges for the company is to make sure that its e-commerce platforms can generate heavy user traffic when more Internet activities migrate to mobile devices. WeChat, which has about 300 million registered users in China, poses a threat because it could steal some of the mobile user traffic away from Taobao and Tmall.

To meet the challenge from Tencent and others competitors in the mobile Internet era, Alibaba has already invested in several online services that are popular among smartphone users, such as Sina Corp.’s Twitter-like Weibo microblog business and mobile mapping software firm AutoNavi Holdings Ltd. But analysts say that messaging apps such as WeChat are powerful platforms for offering various additional services, because mobile users tend to spend a lot of time on those apps talking to families and friends.

Alibaba’s Laiwang has been available to smartphone users since late 2012, but it hasn’t really taken off and it faces an uphill battle against WeChat.

Still, Mr. Ma said in the memo that Alibaba employees shouldn’t think WeChat is too powerful, because the battle in the wirelss Internet market is still only beginning in China.

“We shouldn’t consider going public without achievements in wireless Internet,” Mr. Ma said in the memo.